Colfer Dials Up Another

The Arctic Incident by Eoin Colfer
Reviewed by Jason Koivu
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Action! Action! Action! That's the name of the game in Eoin Colfer's The Arctic Incident.

Child prodigy and criminal mastermind, Artemis Fowl is searching for his kidnapped father. He needs the help of the fairy police, and as it so happens, they need him. Law and lawbreakers work together in this fast-paced, humorous action-fantasy.

Eoin Colfer has created fun fairyland for the 21st century. It's a nice, soft blend of technology and fantasy, not too heavy on either count. The scope of his world is rather limited to Fowl's criminal human underworld and a sort of cartoonish MI5/police bomb squad fairy agency. We're talkin' smart pixies with fire-power!

Though the scope may be narrow, it helps to keep the plot super tight, and I ain't complaining about that. I could however complain that constant Go! GO! GO!!! can be just as bad as a book that goes nowhere. Much too of anything often dulls the senses. Later on in the book I found myself zoning out during the nonstop action.

This is book #2 in Colfer's Artemis Fowl series and many of the same characters reappear. That's understandable...to a point. For instance, the ground munching dwarf Mulch Diggums, a character I thought fresh and inventive when reading the first book, is used again and I felt it was unnecessary. You expect the main characters to return, but Diggums is not a principle player in the grand scheme of things. He's a fun character, but I think Colfer should've come up with something new there, otherwise it's like a comedian coming back for an encore and repeating the same jokes.

Perhaps I could've given this 4 stars for the fun factor, but aside from the complaints above, I also felt that the repetitious feel of the plot from book one to book two was too much. However, if you loved book one and are yearning for more of the same, you'll find it in spades in The Arctic Incident.




View all my reviews